Parts of it were foreshadowed, yes, but it didn't entirely gel until the daughter went into her speech.
I could not see it as accidental that a black character—Addie—is the first to warn against "the people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it, like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it." Zan and David had better send for her when they get settled. Nobody should be left to live alone with Regina and her brothers.
I was significantly impressed since her speech did away entirely with histrionics; no Tennessee Williams shouty declamations here.
Yes. It's a very simple speech. It doesn't need to be more.
Good stuff. Very glad we saw it.
I liked, too, that it wasn't simplistically written: the audience has conflicting loyalties and I think we're directed to. We want to see Regina get the better of her sleazy, condescending brothers, but not over the bodies of her husband and her daughter. She's fighting with unequal weapons, but for what—a controlling interest in a sweatshop cotton mill? Birdie, last daughter of a plantation owner who died in the Civil War, is the personification of the false romanticized antebellum South ("We were good to our people. Everybody knew that. We were better to them than . . .") that shows up badly against the present-day obvious racial inequities of the town, but that doesn't mean she deserves to have ended up a weeping alcoholic in an abusive marriage with a husband who boasts to strangers of his business acumen in marrying her for her family's cotton. There are multiple axes of power in this play. I am only a little sorry that the film couldn't simply let Alexandra, without romance, walk out.
no subject
I could not see it as accidental that a black character—Addie—is the first to warn against "the people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it, like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it." Zan and David had better send for her when they get settled. Nobody should be left to live alone with Regina and her brothers.
I was significantly impressed since her speech did away entirely with histrionics; no Tennessee Williams shouty declamations here.
Yes. It's a very simple speech. It doesn't need to be more.
Good stuff. Very glad we saw it.
I liked, too, that it wasn't simplistically written: the audience has conflicting loyalties and I think we're directed to. We want to see Regina get the better of her sleazy, condescending brothers, but not over the bodies of her husband and her daughter. She's fighting with unequal weapons, but for what—a controlling interest in a sweatshop cotton mill? Birdie, last daughter of a plantation owner who died in the Civil War, is the personification of the false romanticized antebellum South ("We were good to our people. Everybody knew that. We were better to them than . . .") that shows up badly against the present-day obvious racial inequities of the town, but that doesn't mean she deserves to have ended up a weeping alcoholic in an abusive marriage with a husband who boasts to strangers of his business acumen in marrying her for her family's cotton. There are multiple axes of power in this play. I am only a little sorry that the film couldn't simply let Alexandra, without romance, walk out.